1 In A 184: Fun 4U

The concept of a “tourist day” is a rather peculiar one. Of a season that lasts from 1 May to 31 October, one day is for tourists. What about the other 183?

Alcúdia’s tourist-day celebrations have been held for a few years now. The pattern has become established. Like other celebrations, it has acquired a format which, by dint of its repetition each year, becomes a “tradition”. The tradition of the day means an evening of musical entertainment, a market-ette and a mini-disco that follows a morning of fun and frolics for all the family on the beach. All the family that’s still around in September, that is; a few German or Scandinavian stragglers plus Brits whose kids have bunked off the first week of the new term.

The reasons for holding the day in September are that it isn’t quite as hot (a moot point) and that there were it to be held in, say, August, things would be too crowded. With tourists, that is. The last thing you want to do is to hold a tourist-day event with loads of tourists cluttering the place up.

This tourist day of football, food and fabulous Robbie Williams mirrors to an extent the tourist experience. But only to an extent. Missing from its schedule of events are the squabbles over the sun loungers, the getting lagered-up, the projectile vomiting and the all-comers’ balcony-diving contest. There are perhaps certain aspects of holidays that are, however, best left uncelebrated and certainly not sanctioned by a responsible town hall. Which is what Alcúdia is. It does tourism rather well. The tourist day may be just one day in the long season, but it’s better than nothing.

The hug-in of tourists has a positive benefit in that it brings those closeted away in all-inclusives out for the day. Oh, look, there’s a beach! Who’d have thought? However, going by a Facebook comment regarding the beach events, the all-inclusive mentality would appear to demand that little trips out are accompanied by the services being left behind in the hotel.

It was suggested that a certain all-inclusive, well-represented by beach footy teams, should have made provision for a free bar. So, Mister First Choice, he who believes that little trips out will benefit local businesses, think again. You can lead an all-inclusive tourist to the water of a beach, but you can’t make him drink something that he has to pay for out of his own pocket.

Inevitably, an occasion such as the tourist day doesn’t come entirely without a commercial element. Consequently, there was some “marketing” going on. I say this, but I only became aware of one bit of marketing when I looked later at some photos. There they were, some signs for Alcúdia’s estación náutica, the brand title the resort has been lumbered with and which no one understands. I had, however, completely missed the signs despite having been standing right next to them. Another triumph of branding and marketing, therefore.

Then there was the keep-fit dance routine staged by a certain hotel chain. This all seemed reasonable enough until I realised what I was listening to – the hotel song. This was a happy-happy, clappy dance-along of image and word association neurolinguistic programming. Arrange touchstone words such as celebrate, free, good time into no particular order, and bingo, you’ve got yourself some on-beach, tourist-day advertising.

Alcúdia’s tourist day isn’t the only such day that is held in Mallorca. The Palmanova and Magalluf hoteliers put one on as well: “special events to pay tribute to the tourists staying in the area”. A tribute to those staying in the area at the end of September, that is. Even later than Alcúdia’s, there is, however, a possibly wider context to this occasion. 27 September each year is the United Nations World Tourism Day. Mercifully, Magalluf doesn’t look to follow the UN’s example when it comes to its programme. This year, for example, you could enjoy “tourism linking cultures” (to be held in Egypt). Last year’s, in China, sounded a real barrel of laughs – “tourism and biodiversity”; just the sort of topic that would go down a storm in the bars of Punta Ballena.

No, forget the World Tourism Day, and stick to the tourist days of Alcúdia and Magalluf. As the legend on Alcúdia’s tourist day T-shirt says – “Fun 4U” (a T-shirt I am wearing with pride as I write this). And fun it is, if not necessarily for all the family. But hats off nevertheless. Just a shame it’s only one day.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Habits Of A Lunchtime

Television killed the art of conversation. Wrong. The art of conversation, the British art of conversation, never existed, especially not at meal times. Its absence is wrapped up in British habits of a lunchtime or a dinnertime.

The British on holiday at meal times are a morose bunch. They are long-faced and impatient. Service is criticised for its slowness, but this is an excuse to disguise the fact that meal times are suffered rather than enjoyed.

Nations are defined by their eating habits: the habits of what is eaten; when it is eaten; how it is eaten; where it is eaten; why it is eaten; and what is said (or isn’t said).

The British meal time was traditionally a purely functional occasion. It was a utilitarian intrusion, characterised by social awkwardness and by the consumption of food which, at best, was no more than unremarkable. It was the same on the rare occasions that the British ventured out to eat. The tables were silent, the food was hopefully rather better than rank.

Things changed with the gathering pace and numbers of cookery shows and celebrity chefs. From Fanny Craddock through the Galloping Gourmet to Floyd, Delia, the boys Rhodes and Oliver and to Ramsay, a nation has acquired an appreciation of cuisine. But this is pretty much all it has acquired. A nation of shepherd’s pie eaters still marks its meal times with dutiful muteness while the TV shows them food being prepared, discussed, rated, reality-ed and celebritised by celebrities other than chefs themselves; food they are unlikely to ever attempt themselves.

On holiday there isn’t the box with celebrity chefs to fill the silence. Or there may be at the Brit bar which will serve up pie and chips with peas; the telly of a Brit bar is a comfort blanket for the non-communicative.

Meal times as social occasions is a largely alien concept to the British; about as alien as the concept of meal time is to the Mallorcans and Spanish, or indeed the concept of time full stop. The notion of mediodía and therefore lunch can mean pretty much whatever you want it to mean. It almost never means midday, which comes as a shock to those who are the most rigid adherents to time – the Germans, for whom midday and lunch means midday. It doesn’t mean one minute past midday.

Such rigidity is what rules the eating habits. It is the complete opposite of a Mallorcan haphazardness by which meals seem to simply happen. A Mallorcan lack of rigidity is what governs everything else surrounding the meal. It is rarely anything other than a noisy and protracted affair. It is an event in its own right. There can be a theatrical element to it, such as with the presentation of a paella or fideua. The taking of tapas is totally contradictory to the set-piece style of the British main course and dessert and is a style of eating that demands and was in no small part brought about by a social dimension to meals.

The British have never really understood the ethos of meals as events. The inconsequentiality of eating extends to the fact that the British never invented a good wish before a meal. They had to borrow one from the French. “Enjoy your meal” is a ludicrous and recent Americanism, about as ludicrous as the literal translation of bon appétit to “good appetite” that one can encounter in a Mallorcan restaurant.

Climate as much as a non-rigid attitude to meal time has influenced differing eating habits. One might call this the alfresco factor. Eating outside, especially on long, warm evenings, requires a degree of affability and sociability. The alfresco factor is arguably the most significant in having created the differences in eating habits between northern and southern Europe, not so much in terms of what is eaten (though clearly there are differences) but in the nature of the meal.

The meal as social event is celebrated at fiestas. The alfresco evening supper is a feature of them. To the disgust of many in Alcúdia this year’s supper was dropped from the fiesta programme, a curious decision that could have been only marginally based on finance as it was the norm for people to pay. And they did pay. In great numbers. Three thousand or so would sit down in the market square.

The food at such suppers is never grand, but it doesn’t have to be because it is the event itself which matters. Not grand maybe, but a mix of trempó, tumbet and pa amb oli doesn’t taste at all bad on a sultry summer evening. This is what they had at a supper in the enclave of Ses Casetes des Capellans in Playa de Muro the other night. A thousand people having a meal together in even this tiny little place. And was there conversation? Above the noise of the talking, who could tell.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Tradition Industry

There was this flyer in the letter-box. “Traditional Mallorcan cuisine.” The words were in Spanish. You might think that advertising traditional Mallorcan cuisine should demand that the blurb is in Catalan and not in Spanish, but maybe the restaurant is owned by a staunch supporter of the Partido Popular. Anyway, let’s not go there again.

The flyer was less a promotion for the restaurant and more one for a take-away service. “We will cook for you and bring our specialities to your home.” Which is sort of what you expect with a take-away service, but perhaps these things have to be spelt out, as traditional Mallorcan cuisine being ferried around in cardboard containers covered with aluminium on the back of a scooter (or however it is transported) doesn’t sound all that traditional. Contemporary meets the traditional, and it comes on a Honda 125.

Take-away is really pizzas, beef chow mein and tikka masala. Pork wrapped in cabbage? It doesn’t quite have the take-away ring about it. Traditional cuisine demands traditional modes of eating, as in sitting down in a restaurant. But there again, what is traditional?

This is a question I have been grappling with. Traditional – Mallorcan traditional – is referred to that often that is hard to know what is a tradition and what isn’t. The word is interchangeable with “typical”. Restaurants do typical/traditional cuisine, troupes perform typical/traditional dance and music, fiestas are typical/traditional. In the case of La Beata in Santa Margalida, this is the most typical of the lot – or so they always say. Girly saint rebuffs the attentions and temptations of the devil, good conquers evil and a whole tradition spawns demons with fire crackers, beasty masks and virgins of the parish parading in white.

The irony of tradition in a Mallorcan style is that it has created something that is distinctly of today – the tradition industry. There is marketing gold to be alchemised from a dry-stone wall, silver to be sold from the singing of a Sibil·la, bronze from coins clattering in the tills of the most ancient of the island’s traditions, the Talayotic.

The blurring of the lines between modernity and antiquity invites a question as to the degree to which tradition is forced and with the express purpose of creating a marketing benefit from the historical. The very promotion of tradition, with its narrative captured in the word itself and in the words typical or authentic, is sloganising. The words themselves are marketing tools, directed at both the native and the visiting markets.

The constant reinforcement of tradition for domestic consumption reflects a society still uneasy with modernity. Traditional Mallorcan society, by which one means that before the tourism industrial revolution of the sixties and one that was far more wedded to the land than it is now, still resides in the collective memory. This is unlike Britain, for example, where there is a general lack of tradition and an accommodation with its absence that doesn’t require an industry with its marketing plans to force it onto the populace or the tourist.

Of course, there are organisations such as English Heritage which maintain a connection with the past, but the promotion of English and British tradition and culture doesn’t have a sense of desperation; that of demanding that the past is held onto.

A key difference, though, between what occurs in long-industrialised countries and an island such as Mallorca where traditional society can be actively remembered lies in the capacity for a tradition industry to flourish. It could never have happened in Britain, for instance, because the wherewithal for such an industry simply didn’t exist. And by the time the wherewithal was discovered, it was far too late. Contemporary Mallorca, on the other hand, has that wherewithal, because the invention and development of marketing, and hence the tradition industry, pretty much coincided with the island’s industrial revolution.

Mallorca’s traditions aren’t invented, thanks to the temporal proximity to when traditional society started its decline, but they are an invention of the marketer who flogs them to a tourist market which has forgotten its own traditions.

Tradition is good. That’s the message, even if what is described as traditional isn’t necessarily exceptional. So it is with much traditional Mallorcan cuisine. Yea, it’s ok, but then so are fish and chips. They’re traditional, but they don’t come with a label attached that demands that they are considered thus. And the constant labelling is the constant reinforcement of a marketing message.

The flyer in the letter-box was selling. But it was also selling, in its curiously contemporary take-away way, that is on behalf of one of Mallorca’s strongest industries, its tradition industry.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Getting Into A Flap

Good weather for them. Ducks that is. The rain that has been about has been well-timed. We are entering the duck season, or we would be were there any ducks. And in Can Picafort of course, there aren’t. Not officially anyway. In a rare display of unity, however, the warring political parties of Santa Margalida are as one in demanding the return of the ducks.

The town hall is calling for a change to animal-protection law that would legalise the release of live ducks during Can Picafort’s August fiestas. Under this law, or so it would seem, traditions that can be shown to date back more than 100 years from the time of the law’s enactment in 1992 are allowed to continue. The great duck-throwing event of Can Picafort isn’t that old. Consequently, Santa Margalida wants the threshold reduced to 50 years; ducks were first let go into the sea for locals to swim after them and capture them in the 1930s.

The town hall has never truly bought into the law and the banning of live ducks. It was persuaded to comply with it when it was fined for not having complied. Ever since the live ducks were replaced by rubber ones, the town hall has only grudgingly gone along with the law. And by town hall, one means all the parties, whether ruling or opposing.

The unified front that is now being displayed has, though, not always been evident. The former administration proposed a similar change to the law late last year. The opposition didn’t go along with it, yet it, now in power, has made the proposal. Even in unity, the parties can’t avoid having a dig at each other. You didn’t support us, say the Partido Popular. It was our measure. We didn’t support you, respond the combined forces of the Suma pel Canvi and the Convergència, because it wouldn’t have done any good; the former regional administration wouldn’t have approved it.

Though a national law, there would seem to be flexibility for a regional parliament (the Balearics one) to amend it. As the Partido Popular is now in power at regional level, the town hall would reckon that it might get a more sympathetic hearing.

The banning of live ducks, and Santa Margalida finally got round to complying with the law five years ago, has turned the tradition into a new one. The event attracts way more publicity as a consequence of the law being flouted than it ever did when ducks themselves were being released.

That said, before the ban there was the annual ritual of the animal-rights activists getting into an argument with the pro-duck-throwers, a ritual that has now become one of the animal rightists trooping off to make a “denuncia” when the law is broken. And the poor police, who surely have better things to do, have been caught in the middle, both the local police under the command of a town hall whose attitude has been ambiguous, to say the least, and the Guardia who have had to resort to bringing in divers and boats to try and prevent the throwing of live ducks and to try and apprehend the miscreants.

Last year, one town hall official said the police presence was more akin to security for the royal family or an ETA threat. The law may have been likely to have been broken, which it duly was (and no one was caught), but the publicity and the security were absurd for what has always been an absurd occasion, one that became more absurd as soon as they started to use rubber ducks instead. They should have scrapped the whole thing rather than allow it to become the farce it has.

The duck-throwing saga of Can Picafort can be considered an example of what happens when you mess with tradition, but how traditional really is the duck throwing? Establishing a time frame, be it 50 or 100 years, seems pretty arbitrary. Indeed, it seems ridiculous. If it is felt that something requires outlawing, then so be it, regardless of how long it has been going.

The ducks only came about as a bit of sport. Wealthy landowners would make a gift of some ducks, and the young men of the village would compete to capture them. Do 70 or 80 years represent a “tradition”? Maybe they do, or maybe they represent the history of something basically frivolous. Whatever the case, there are enough people, on both sides of the argument, who get into a flap about the ducks. And they will continue to do so, whether the law is changed or not.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Lead Us Not Into Temptation

What every girl dreams. If she lives in Santa Margalida. At the weekend, Francisca Oliver Fornés was chosen to be La Beata, the saint Catalina Thomàs. Requirements for being selected include having participated as an attendant in previous Beata ceremonies, being church-going, single and eighteen. To be nominated as La Beata is quite some honour. The fiesta in September is often referred to as Mallorca’s most traditional, La Beata herself acting out the refusal to be tempted by the devil.

Single, eighteen, not necessarily church-going and not necessarily inclined to turn down temptation. The contrast between a weekend ceremony to select the current-day embodiment of a saint and a weekend ceremony of unsaintliness is stark. At a similar time to Francisca’s selection, the Districte 54 party in Sa Pobla was rumbling. The mayor of Sa Pobla has been forced to apologise to the people of the town. Mess, noise, lack of respect, excessive drinking. What on earth had he expected?

The mayor had wanted the party reinstated as part of the town’s fiestas. It was largely his doing that it took place this year. It was he who had criticised the previous administration for not staging it last year. It was he who said that it brought economic benefits and a load of people from across the island.

He was not wrong in respect of the numbers attending. But the numbers, as with other fiesta parties, are swelled by those who, thanks to social networks, know full well that there’s to be a botellón. The street-drinking parties are happening everywhere. Organised through Facebook and what have you, they are creating attendances at the parties so large that villages and towns cannot cope. They are being overwhelmed by people, by drunkenness and violence. I ask again: what on earth had the mayor expected?

Districte 54, more than most of the parties, is a magnet for trouble. It’s why it was banned last year. Nevertheless, the town decided to go ahead with it again, with the result that the police had to respond to numerous complaints and the medical services were needed to treat those who were totally off their faces.

Mayor Serra says that there will not be a repetition; that if the party happens again, it won’t take place slap bang in the centre of the town. It might find a convenient finca somewhere in the countryside, which is what they have done in Maria de la Salut, and the parties there pass off without much incident.

Whether it happens again or not, the trouble at Districte 54 is further evidence of the degree to which the fiesta parties have grown in size to the point at which they are out of control. The wishes of town halls to limit street drinking botellóns, as in Pollensa, are not being met because the social networks enable people to find ways around whatever controls might be put in place. The town halls seem to have failed utterly to comprehend how modern communications work.

The traditional Mallorcan fiesta has broken down and has been taken over by DJs and cheap booze. And this breakdown in tradition isn’t simply one that can be styled as being down to the generation gap. There is a division also within generations. Which is what Francisca represents. While she was being named Santa Margalida’s Beata, the Santa Margalida herself was being defiled in Sa Pobla; Districte 54 was part of the Santa Margalida festivities.

The coincidence of this is one thing; the contrast another. Over one weekend in July, two separate happenings highlighted the way in which Mallorcan youth has split. The requirement for a Beata aspirant to demonstrate her good Catholic credentials seems almost quaint now. The church has lost much meaning for and support among the younger generation.

If you had to choose between the two, you would opt for Districte 54 and its attendant troubles as being more representative of Mallorcan youth than Francisca and La Beata. And if you do opt so, it kills, once and for all, the myth of Mallorcan (and Spanish) youth being unlike their British counterparts. You might recall that some while ago a report established that the level of alcohol intake among Spanish teenagers was as high if not higher and the frequency of drinking greater than that of British kids.

Of course, you can’t and shouldn’t tar every Mallorcan teenager and young person with the same alcoholic or violent brush, just as you shouldn’t the British youth, but what can be said with some certainty is that a societal shift isn’t underway; it has already happened. Temptation has been taken. And no amount of saintliness will put the devil back in the box.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

All Night Long: Fiesta parties

So there will, after all, be a party on the final night of Pollensa’s Patrona festivities. Public pressure helped to ensure this, the last town hall meeting having been packed by those in favour of it. The mayor had been criticised for not having consulted in seeking to ditch the event.

Here we go again. If it’s Pollensa, it must be a case of the town hall not consulting. There are some things it should consult about, such as the pedestrianisation plan for Puerto Pollensa that was scrapped primarily because it had failed to consult, but there is surely a limit to what it is obliged to consult about. Or perhaps, in the case of fiestas, the people’s parties if you like, there should be an obligation. There again, they didn’t consult the people of Puerto Pollensa about what has turned out to be a programme for Virgen del Carmen that is like little more than a village fete.

The night party is going ahead, but economic constraints will mean that it will finish earlier than previously, at 2.30 in the morning of 2 August. Economic constraints or something else? The deputy mayor, Malena Estrany, hopes that by ending the party a couple of hours earlier there will not be a repeat of the botellón street party and unseemliness that has been associated with the event. There remains the suspicion that cost was a secondary factor in the town hall’s wish to call the event off, and that the botellón was the primary factor.

But now, having backtracked, the town hall would wish us to believe that lopping two hours off the party will help to stop a grand old booze-up. Are they serious? The strangeness of this logic is made even stranger by the town hall’s intention to ask neighbouring towns to check that people being bussed in to the event from the likes of Sa Pobla or Alcúdia aren’t carrying drink.

This presumably means the local police in these towns being called on to search and confiscate. A question arises whether they have any right to do so. Drinking alcohol in the street may be against local laws, drinking on a bus may also be, but carrying drink? Moreover, drink can be obtained in other ways. The botellón isn’t always just a bunch of people turning up at random with a carrier-bag with a couple of cheap bottles of vino.

Elsewhere in Mallorca, one party has been scrapped precisely because of the problems that a botellón can create. In Pòrtol, following incidents last weekend, a DJ party for this coming Saturday is to be dropped and probably replaced by a dance orchestra.

But also this coming Saturday, a party which had been dropped last year and which had acquired greater notoriety than the Patrona party is to make a re-appearance. Sa Pobla is organising the Districte 54 event as part of its Santa Margalida festivities. This was banned last year on safety grounds and because of complaints about noise and the state that the town got into thanks to its accompanying botellón.

Districte 54 has been one of the biggest of the fiesta night parties. It was first launched in 2003 by the then Partido Popular administration in the town. Who is now the new mayor of Sa Pobla? Biel Serra of the Partido Popular. Last year he criticised the decision to scrap the event, pointing to its economic benefits and to the fact that it brought the whole island to Sa Pobla.

There is more than just a hint of the populist behind the decision to resurrect Districte 54, and Pollensa’s mayor may also have begun to have had second thoughts about how a decision to ban the night party might impact on his popularity, a mere month into his new term of office.

Serra’s belief that Districte 54 has economic benefits contrasts with the economic constraints said to have been influencing the Pollensa decision. Which brings you back to the question as to how well these economic benefits are measured, if at all, and to a further question therefore, which is, despite the costs of staging events, do they actually generate a sufficiently greater revenue?

Local businesses would argue that they do. And this is the nub of the issue with the botellón parties which occur at Patrona or Districte 54. Yes, they can cause unpleasantness but they are really about potentially depriving businesses of revenue; hence the measures that are being introduced to try and limit their impact. People can put up with noise and mess if the tills are turning. And you can bet that those who packed the Pollensa town hall meeting weren’t just revellers.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The New Model Fiesta

The rumours had been circulating, and for once they proved to have substance. Puerto Pollensa’s summer fiesta of Virgen del Carmen will have neither a firework display nor a beach party. The fireworks that finish off Pollensa town’s Patrona fiesta in August are a likely further victim of the financial crisis at Pollensa town hall. What else? Will Cala San Vicente, treated as a sideshow anyway, have any sort of a fiesta this summer?

It comes as no great surprise, other than that it has taken till this year for reality to bite. The funding shortages have been there for ages. They existed B.C. (before crisis), but no one thought to do much about them, ever reliant on government funds or taking on extra debt that town halls are now forbidden from doing.

In 2009, cuts to fiesta budgets did start to come in. In Pollensa, for instance, there was supposed to have been a reduction of up to 25%. If there indeed was, and the main targets were said at the time to be the autumn and wine fairs rather than the fiestas, then it wasn’t necessarily obvious.

If there are to be cuts to the fiestas, and there have to be, then what should their priorities be, who should pay for them and who indeed should organise them? Is a firework display, for instance, a priority? It depends on how much it costs, and getting to that information isn’t always straightforward.

One town, Felanitx, cut its budget for fireworks by 2,000 euros in 2009, so that it cost 3,000 euros. My guess is that displays in resorts such as Can Picafort and Puerto Pollensa require a far larger wedge. Upwards probably of 10,000 euros. More possibly.

In itself, this doesn’t sound like a lot. In the context of this year’s budget for fiestas in Puerto Pollensa of 30,000 euros, then it is. But note that it is fiestas and not fiesta. The budget was for both Virgen del Carmen, now stripped of its fireworks and beach party, and the Feria del Mar and Sant Pere fiesta just gone. Yet, the main fiesta is Virgen del Carmen. Sant Pere may not cost a lot by comparison, but why didn’t they just scrap it? Why have two fiestas three weeks apart? And on the religious angle, Sant Pere, or rather his image, gets dragged out during the Virgen celebrations, so what’s the point of the earlier event?

The argument goes that the fiestas bring in tourists. I’m not convinced that they do, except those which occur out of season. There may be some tourists who book holidays expressly with the fiestas in mind, but how many is some? I’m sure no one has bothered to find out. But as there is so much entertainment being laid on, then maybe those who enjoy it, whether specifically attracted by fiestas or not, should contribute to the cost.

I don’t have a good suggestion as to how you would create a mechanism for doing so, but assuming one could be dreamt up and let’s say you have five thousand tourists knocking around, charge them all two euros a pop and bingo, there’s the cost of your fireworks covered. And while you’re at it, what about charging people from other towns? They don’t pay the local taxes.

If not tourists paying, then what about the private sector? In the town of Dos Hermanas in the province of Sevilla, business has come to the rescue of the fiesta firework display. Put such a suggestion to businesses in Puerto Pollensa, and it would probably go down like a lead balloon, given the poor relations with the town hall and gripes about services for which taxes are paid, but the involvement of the private sector is common enough in other countries. In the USA, for example, the money for fireworks at fairs typically comes not from local authorities but from fundraising and from business.

And then there is the issue of who organises the fiestas. There has been talk of local people in Puerto Pollensa trying to stage the missing ingredients to the Virgen fiesta. In Inca, they have already looked to involve the locals in fiesta organisation. As a general principle, were the local citizenship charged with doing the organising, were it given a grant by the town hall (lower obviously than what it would otherwise spend), then this would not only give the local population greater “ownership” of the fiestas, it would also bring about a mix of private-public funding.

Perhaps we have to accept that the fiestas got too lavish for their own good and that a return to a more basic fiesta becomes the norm; DJs playing dance music isn’t exactly traditional. Or perhaps we should now expect a different model for the fiestas, and one that isn’t dependent upon the public purse.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Party’s Over: Fiestas

The threat of cuts to fiesta programmes is becoming a reality. Pollensa town hall is considering scrapping the street party of the night of 1 August that runs on into the early hours of 2 August, the day of the Moors and Christians battle that is the climax to the town’s Patrona festivities.

Mayor Tomeu Cifre has said that something has to give. If not the street party, then other things would have to go, one possibility being the “marxa fresca” (the white party) that is normally held on the night before the street party.

You might ask what the difference is between these two parties. Both are, after all, held in the streets and squares of Pollensa. The marxa fresca is more an open-air disco in the Plaça Major, whereas the street party of 1 August involves three squares holding rock and dance music concerts. The cost alone of staging this street party, according to the mayor, is 40,000 euros; 40,000 euros the town hall simply hasn’t got.

The funding crisis for cultural events in Pollensa nearly claimed this year’s music festival. While the previous town hall administration was tardy, to blame it entirely for the disorganisation is unfair. The new tourism ministry has ridden to the music festival’s rescue in providing emergency funds, the ministry of the last government having blocked funding.

The town hall was short of nearly two hundred thousand euros for the music festival, money that had traditionally been forthcoming from the government. Though the new tourism minister, Carlos Delgado, has assured his support for the music festival, he has also made it perfectly clear that an examination of grants to events from the government is going to be undertaken – in an as objective fashion as possible. In other words, there can be no guarantee that the music festival, along with any other recipient of government cash, will be helped out so generously in future, if at all.

In the case of the music festival, why has the tourism ministry been helping to fund it? I raised the question before. What does it really do for tourism? Well, come on, what does it do? Anyone able to give a firm answer? I would very much doubt it. If any ministry should be putting its hands into its pockets, then it should be that for culture.

In terms of the economic resources directed towards fiestas or festivals and of the direct economic benefits from tourism, to justify funding in the name of tourism is sophistry.

In Pollensa the mayor has also said that the budget for this year’s fiestas, well down in any event on what is needed, will see 30,000 euros directed towards the fiestas in Puerto Pollensa, both the recent “feria del mar” and the upcoming Virgen del Carmen.

The town hall has 130,000 euros in all at its disposal. Patrona in the old town gets the lion’s share of the budget (100,000 euros), yet, with the exception of the Moors and Christians battle, Patrona doesn’t necessarily attract huge numbers of tourists. The events in the port, on the other hand, do, for the very good reason that this is where most of the tourists are to be found.

This underlines the fact that, for all the talk of fiestas as traditional events which appeal to tourists, tourists are not the primary target. They are events for the local population; as is the case with the music festival as well. There is nothing at all wrong with this, but, and despite the music festival being a different category of event to fiestas, Delgado is absolutely right to be taking a hard look at grants. If by doing so, he sends out a message to town halls that they need to apply greater realism, then he will have done a great service.

To come back to the street party, there is a further reason for its possibly being scrapped, and that is the problems it causes. Increasingly, it has become an excuse for an almighty great piss-up – a botellón – and the ambience is less than pleasant. Calls have been made, for instance, for people to desist from using the streets as toilets.

In Sa Pobla they dropped their own street party last year. Similar reasons were cited to those in Pollensa where there has been disquiet expressed as to the fact that the fiestas have lost their sense of tradition among young people and simply become the launch pad for drunkenness and misbehaviour. So, Pollensa town hall has more than one agenda when it comes to abandoning the street party, but overriding this is the fact that the fiestas have needed to be scrutinised more intensely. It’s a great shame that economic crisis has necessitated this, but it is long overdue.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Where A Sardine Is A Sardine

An awful lot of sardines get eaten at fiesta time. They are the staple diet of Puerto Alcúdia’s Sant Pere and of Puerto Pollensa’s mini-me Sant Pere, that you might call the Sant Perito. The sardines are trawled and then hauled on to grills for the evening of the “sardinada”; yes, Catalan and Spanish have a word for a sardine nosh-in.

The humble sardine isn’t perhaps the first fish or seafood that springs to mind when it comes to Mallorcan fishy gastronomy. Rather, it is maybe the lobster, the sea bass or other more substantial creatures of the sea. But being humble is something of a virtue for fiesta and fair suppers. Like the rubber-ringed cuttlefish, the sardine is peasant food of the Med, if peasant isn’t a contradiction in this context, which of course it is. Unlike the cuttlefish, unless it is prepared in certain ways, the sardine is uniformly yummy and edible.

The sardine can, though, claim some sort of kudos. It is all down to perception. And marketing. Where the Brits are concerned, that is. Pilchards were once famously rebranded as Cornish sardines by a Cornish pilchard industry desperately seeking to improve sales, and it succeeded in doing so through the simply expedient of renaming the pilchard.

Pilchards are things that come in flat cans with oily tomato sauce and which certainly used to be an extraordinarily cheap source of student sustenance; they were when I was a student anyway. The sardine, albeit that it too can come in a tin and usually does, is altogether more haute cuisine, if by implication of name and nothing else. Sardines and pilchards differ only by size; the former are smaller.

And sardines have acquired haute cuisine status, thanks to Heston Blumenthal, but sardine sorbet is unlikely to be found on the quayside tables of the Mallorcan sardinada. Nor is there likely to be any pilchard-sardine debate. A sardine is a sardine, regardless of size.

It is the lot of the Mallorcans, however, that their sardine should be associated with another island. It is debated as to whether the sardine really does derive its name from Sardinia, but even if it doesn’t, there are certain ties between the islands. Once upon a time, one imagines, there was more physical proximity, but in more recent times, if you can call the sixth century AD recent, Mallorca came under Sardinian control. Mallorca’s Byzantine period found the island administered from across the Med. And more recently than this, Aragonese and later Spanish rule of Sardinia left a Catalan imprint on the language; a variant of Catalan is still spoken on the island.

If the sardine is more originally a native of Sardinian waters, then what about other aspects of the “sardinada”? One is the music. In Puerto Alcúdia at any rate. Each year the fiesta programmes betray an unfailing familiarity, and the musical accompaniment to the sardinada is evidence of this. A group called Sotavent always pitches up to serenade the sardine-munchers. What they play is “havanera”. And this is?

What it isn’t is traditionally Mallorcan. The clue lies in the word. The havanera is derived from Havana. The music is Cuban, and its origins date back to nineteenth century immigration. Why it has become a part of the sardinada, and not just in Alcúdia, is hard to say, other than perhaps a seafaring association between Spain and the Caribbean.

The havanera is an example of how fiestas have embraced elements that are nothing to do with Mallorca or Spain as such. Another is the batucada, the colossal drumming racket that takes place at many a fiesta. It is basically a samba beat, Afro-Brazilian in its roots.

So some of the traditions of the fiestas are not as traditional as they might seem. In the case of sardines, they are a traditional fish of the Med but not of course of Mallorca alone, but more importantly they are sardines, and not pilchards.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Pork Scratchings And Sardines: Carnival in Mallorca

“The Guardian”, bless ’em, can always be relied upon, along with the rest of the quality British press, to present “top ten” lists of places which will cost you a small fortune to visit on the pretext of a bit of culture. Want Carnival? Why not try Uruguay? Of course. Rio is just so last year.

You could always slum it somewhere a bit closer to home. Cadiz or Tenerife, for instance. The latter is making a bid for its Santa Cruz carnival to become a World Heritage Site. I’m not sure how a carnival can be a site, as somewhat by definition it doesn’t stay still, but be this as it may.

Or you could always opt for Mallorca. Well, you could, but it won’t cut much ice over the dinner table when Gideon and Clarissa produce their iPhone with videos of the Oruro Carnival in Bolivia. (And no, I’d never heard of it either, until I eagerly looked at the recommendations in “The Guardian”.)

Carnival in Mallorca is something of a Blue Peter make-do with your mum’s old sheets and some face-paint affair compared with the Lady Gaga-meets-Elton John during his diva phase extravagance of Tenerife. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t make the top ten.

The Mallorca carnival is carnival-lite. Which is not to say it doesn’t have something going for it, but it is small beer of a fiesta compared with the full barrel of others. It may have something to do with fiesta overload from December and January (though probably not) or with the one-time ban that was placed on carnival by old misery guts. Franco reckoned that it was all a bit too much like fun and that the wearing of masks was a disguise for a spot of villainy.

Nevertheless, most towns celebrate carnival in some way or other. Usefully, for once, there is even some advance warning. Alcúdia, for instance, has announced that the fifth and sixth of March will be days of “an explosion of colour”. Perhaps so, but there are explosions and then there are small bangs. Palma will be carnival-ing from 3 March (this year’s “Dijous Llarder” – la-di-da, it’s lardy day) to 9 March.

As with the small beer and the small bangs, there is also the small food fare on offer. Palma, so goes the blurb, will have the “famous ensaïmadas”; Alcúdia, the sobrassada. Sounds much like any other do, then. There is always the wacky tradition of burying a sardine, but the Mallorcans might for once take a leaf out of the slim volume that is British folk tradition and import the nearest thing there is in Britain to carnival, i.e. Pancake Day. Do they still do Pancake Day, by the way? Once upon a time, it was that big that it made the news on the telly; film of housewives with head scarves, curlers and pinnies racing through the mud with frying-pans. It was a time when news was much like Mallorca’s, as in there wasn’t any.

The Germans, strangely enough, could also teach the locals a thing or two when it comes to carnival. Being mad and having a sense of humour aren’t quite the same thing, but what the Germans may lack in the comedy department, they make up for by being totally off their heads. Unaware of the strength of carnival in Germany, I once switched on the telly and was confronted with what looked like some parliamentary session or other that was being staged by Coco the Clown. After some minutes I realised it was a parliamentary session being staged by Coco. Not that this would work in Mallorca. The local politicians dressed up as clowns. How would you notice the difference from any other day?

There is also the German carnival tradition of women rummaging around in the kitchen drawers for a pair of scissors and then heading off to the local pubs and cutting off men’s ties. I assume this to have some symbolism, though the precise symbol is not something I care to think too deeply about.

Though Mallorcan carnival may not be about to make top ten listings, it isn’t without its moments. The “Rua” parades can be colourful, if not explosively so. Alcúdia promises a “permissive and burlesque party”, a feature of which is the wearing of satirical masks representing well-known people, politicos in particular. It’s those clowns after all. And there is of course meant to be some religious meaning to the whole deal, the last days (“els darrers dies”) before Lent and the consequent abstinence from eating meat. Supposedly. So, along with the sobrassadas and the lardy ensaïmada, you can also tuck into the “coca de llardons”. Pork scratchings cake. You know, they really ought to consider the pancake.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.